


'Cause it Was Not Said to You

by bellagerantalii



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Flashbacks, M/M, Natasha Is a Good Bro, Period-Typical Homophobia, Prostitute Steve, prostitute!Bucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-16
Updated: 2015-01-16
Packaged: 2018-03-07 20:56:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3182885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellagerantalii/pseuds/bellagerantalii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All the stuffy historians want to interview Steve, and he turns them all down until one of them digs up some top-secret report about Bucky. Set pre-Winter Soldier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	'Cause it Was Not Said to You

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys! Go read "The Gay Metropolis" and "Coming Out Under Fire."

Sometimes Steve thinks the only people alive who are truly happy he’s back are the World War II historians. 

Almost as soon as SHIELD and the President announced his recovery, requests for interviews came pouring in. Would Captain Rogers consider being interviewed by Dr. What’s Their Name of This University? Just for a dozen three-hour sessions or so, about Azano? Or maybe about the Normandy landings? What did Captain America think about the Concentration Camps, or the Japanese-American Internment camps?

Steve has no desire to relive events still fresh in his mind, especially when he knows he should be focused on getting used to things like credit cards and toaster ovens. Eventually, he gives Maggie, the SHIELD agent who’s working as his screen/publicist a blanket order to turn them all down, no matter who’s asking.

Instead of speaking with stuffy academics, he spends days wandering around New York, trying to find the remnants of his building in Brooklyn, or drawings by his old friends on the walls of his former art school. One day he walks into the men’s section in Macy’s, simply because it’s in the same building on Harold Square as it was in 1945, and manages to find pants that actually sit where he wants them to on his waist. 

He goes to the local Y, and finds it so completely changed that he never goes back.

He tries to draw pictures to put on the walls of his apartment, a loft SHIELD has set him up in. It’s in an old textile factory, about three blocks from the old Brooklyn Navy Yard. There’s a new kitchen with a microwave, a gym in the basement, and entirely too much space. When Steve asks Maggie if SHIELD kept any of his sketchbooks or other drawings, she frowns, and quietly admits that they’re all in the hands of museums or private collectors.

 

Maggie is short with curly red hair. She’s made Steve’s dining room her office away from the office, and she spends most of her day there, recording her observations about Steve (a condition upon his release from the SHIELD facility), taking his vitals every morning when she arrives and every evening right before she leaves, and deflecting the phone calls from researchers and the press. Thankfully, these calls seem to come less and less. Steve knows it probably has something to do with the verbal evisceration Maggie gave to the professor from Yale after he called for the tenth time in a week. Steve’s grateful for that, he really is, but Maggie tries to stay out of his life as much as possible, even while she’s essentially following him everywhere he goes. It’s awkward at best, and downright annoying at worst. 

Then, of course, Loki attacks New York, and everyone wants to interview Steve again. Except now it’s not just historians hoping for an interview that will rock the historical narrative—now people want to know if he ever thought he’d encounter aliens in the 40s.

Steve does encounter Howard Stark’s son, though. He’s not blown away by Tony Stark like most people seem to be, but he is impressed with his skills and, by the end of the Battle of New York, with his heart. Even if Steve does feel like the grandpa of the motley crew they’ve assembled, it’s still the first shared life experience he’s had with anyone since he woke up. 

After his “Battle of New York,” Steve finally musters up the courage to go see Peggy. At her nursing home in Northern Virginia, she bursts into tears when she sees him, but she’s still the Peggy Steve fell in love with in 1942, and she quickly regains her composure, joking about the amount of plastic surgery Steve must have had in order to look so young.

Steve has to ask her what plastic surgery is.

He manages to keep in touch with Natasha and Clint, especially after he agrees to work for SHIELD. He’s teamed up with them regularly, and Natasha almost imperceptibly ingratiates herself into his life. She takes him to some clothing store and buys him pants that “don’t look like Clint’s grandfather’s. Honestly, Steve.” She and Clint give him a crash course in twentieth century pop culture, and Natasha gives him a long, detailed summary of the Cold War over beers while they install a DVD player and Bose sound system in Steve’s new apartment in DC. 

One of the other nice things about having Nat and Clint around is that Maggie finally leaves. She simply stops appearing one day, but leaves the phone that people call for interviews. Steve finds out how to let calls go directly to voicemail, and Natasha records a message, in her most silky and condescending tone, that informers callers that Captain Rogers will be in touch if he decides to accept. 

Clint listens to the fist round of voicemails when he’s drunk. 

“Some guy from Oxford wants to interview you. Something about… about Nazi vampires? Vampires who were Nazis. Did you fight vampires? I bet that was cool. Do you have vampire blood in that serum of yours?”

So it becomes a thing. Every other Wednesday they put the phone on speaker and listen to the messages while drinking extremely potent Russian vodka that Steve is pretty sure is illegal in the US. It gives him a buzz, for Christ’s sake, as long as he drinks almost a bottle and hour. 

But of course a week comes with both Natasha and Clint out on separate missions, and Steve finds himself sitting alone in his apartment. Sighing, he glances at his voicemail inbox. The number of calls he’s been getting lately have plummeted, which may have something to do with the media being obsessed with Tony Stark’s recent challenge to some guy called the Mandarin, so maybe Steve will get lucky and…

There is one message on his machine. 

Steve takes a swig of vodka to prepare himself, and hits play.

“Hello, Captain Rogers. My name is Susan Kinosian,” comes a measured alto voice, “and I’m an Associate Professor of History at Hudson University. I’m doing some research for my next book---“

Here we go again, thinks Steve, taking another swig of vodka. 

“And while I was doing some archival work I found something that I think you may be interested in. It’s a 1943 memo exchange between a Colonel Phillips and a Colonel Beresford regarding the relationship between you and Sergeant James Barnes. It was, um, filed away with dishonorable discharges… I would really love to hear your take on it. Please call me back at your earliest convenience at this number.”

The message ends with the bottle of vodka halfway to Steve’s mouth. He sets it down gently on the floor, and plays the message again, and again. It’s the same thing each time. Then he gets up and puts one of his Benny Goodman records on, turning the volume as low as it will go without being silent. Then he stretches out in his comfiest chair and Could anyone have actually known? It’s not like we were open about it around anyone else. Did we ever actually do anything in the army? Who the fuck is Colonel Beresford?

***  
1940

“How’s that new job working out?” Steve asks, climbing into bed and pushing himself as close to Bucky as possible. It’s the dead of winter, and they can barely scrape enough together to keep the place livable. Best thing to do is go to bed with the sun and save as much money on electricity and gas as they can.

“You’re in late,” Bucky replies, wrapping his arms around Steve and letting him warm his cold feet up with Bucky’s slightly-less-cold legs. 

“Walter from my illustration class kept bugging me about going out for drinks with him. Took me awhile to convince him I wasn’t interested. How’s that job?”

“Walter’s that rich pansy from Westchester, right?” Bucky asks, instead of answering Steve’s question. “What did you finally have to say to lose him?”

“That boys from Brooklyn fuck better than boys from Westchester, but maybe I was wrong?” Steve says, teasing as Bucky’s hand dips under his waistband to tease a Steve’s cock through his fraying boxers. 

“I am Brooklyn’s finest, Steve, but I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for proof until you feel less like a popsicle.”

“There are always other options,” Steve says, and Bucky smiles, disappearing under the covers.

This is their routine. They come home, they eat, they fuck, and they lay in bed and talk. They may be a little in love with each other. 

“So, how’s the job?” Steve asks, managing to sound stern five minutes after he finishes a litany of praises to Buck’s cock as he sucked him off.

Bucky is silent, absently running his fingers through Steve’s hair.

“You got laid off, didn’t you?”

“They didn’t get as many orders as they were projecting. They let the new guys go first.”

“You’ll find another job, Buck, handsome face like yours.”

“You just make sure to get that WPA job you were telling me about. It’ll hold us over until I find something new.”

“Mph, if you say so.”

***

“Hey Nat? I need you to do me a favor.” Steve shouts towards his phone as he dumps hot pasta through a colander. 

“You’re going to let me set you up?” Nat asks hopefully, her voice slightly off-pitch because Steve has his phone on speaker.

“Kind of. I’ve decided to do one of those interviews,” Steve says as he shakes the colander to drain the water from the pasta. 

“Oh have you now? And on which old bearded academic are you gracing your presence? Is it the guy from that Christian college? His proposal was very complimentary. I’ve never seen a guy fail so miserably to hide the fact that he furtively masturbated your posters before going to hand bell practice.”

“Thank you for that mental image. And no, I am actually bestowing myself on Susan Kinosian.”

“I haven’t read her proposal yet. It’s been sitting in that email we set up. Did she leave a voicemail?”

“Yeah. I listened to it last night.”

“Were you sitting on your floor drinking alone?”

“Can you call her back and tell her I’m willing to meet with her?” says Steve, choosing not to comment.

“Sure, just let me read this…” Natasha trails off, and Steve hears her laptop turning on and Nat settling into a chair to read the proposal. Steve, meanwhile, pours way too much Caesar dressing over his salad and starts in on his dinner.

“Did you know about these memos?” Nat finally asks, with no hint of judgment in her voice—only curiosity. 

“No, and no one ever told me that they, um, knew about Bucky and I before the War.”

“So you and your dishy Sergeant Barnes were going down behind closed doors. Steve, I’m impressed. Where did that leave Peggy Carter in all of this?”

“It was over by the time I met her. I’m not actually sure if it ever really began.”

“Hmmm,” Nat says, considering. Steve shoves some more salad in his mouth at what turns out to be a poor time, because Nat suddenly asks him:

“Did you love him?”

And Steve really shouldn’t be talking about his first love, who he still considers rather recently dead, while trying to stop lettuce falling out of his mouth, but there you are.

“Yes,” he says, swallowing. “I did. And he broke it off.”

“May I ask why?” Nat says, almost tentatively.

“It’s a long story.”

***  
It’s been three weeks, and Bucky’s found a temporary job sweeping up at the corner store, but they know it isn’t permanent, and they’re overdue on their heating bill. Steve stills feels helpless, sitting in school on a scholarship when he should be out there working. But, as Bucky often reminds him, there’s not much work for a fit guy out there, let alone puny asthmatic Steve. So he sits and learns to illustrate and hopes that in a year or so he can get a deal to draw some children’s books. Or maybe comic books.

They always seem to get lucky, though, Bucky and Steve, because just as Bucky’s job is starting the wear out, Steve’s dean informs him that he’s won the WPA job to paint murals at one of the New York Public Libraries. Steve will be doing to stenciling, and Walter Beresford with be coloring.

Steve finds Walter smoking an expensive cigarette outside the photography darkroom.

“Well, if it isn’t Steve Rogers. Decide to take me up on that drink after all?” Walter asks, looking Steve up and down and smiling. He obviously likes what he sees, as he’s made it abundantly clear for over six months. 

“Fat chance. Why are you working this WPA project? You don’t need the money,” Steve says, drawing himself up as tall as possible. 

Walter blows smoke into Steve’s face, sending him hacking into his sleeve. 

“There are dozens of people here who need the money. That’s who the WPA was designed to work for,” Steve continues undeterred as soon as he’s taken a couple of deep breaths. 

“Has anyone ever told you how cute your lips are when they’re almost chapped? So pink, Steven.”

Bucky, has, in fact, told Steve the same thing, but all he gives Walter is a look that Steve can only hope is stern, especially coming from him.

“Tell you what,” Walter says, smiling and blowing cigarette smoke up above his head, away from Steve. “You let me take you out for a drink tonight, and I’ll tell Dean Morton I don’t want the job. I’ll even shake on it,” he says, holding out his hand.

Steve immediately takes it. 

***

About two weeks after first getting Dr. Kinosian’s call, Steve rents a car and drives up to New York. Dr. Kinosian’s university is just outside the city, and Steve finds it easily with his new GPS (something he adores). He gets there around noon on a Saturday, so most of the students are still sleeping or just waking up, and the campus is quiet. 

Steve parks his car in a nearly empty lot, and finds the History building nearby. Inside there are comfy chairs arranged in small groups, department offices with a huge corkboard of notices outside, and a group of girls hanging a banner proclaiming “5th Annual Hudson HERstory Conference” in the main lobby. After helping to steady the rather rickety ladder they’re using, and taking several pamphlets they offer him, the girls give him directions to Dr. Kinosian’s office, thanking him as he walks away. 

The door to her office is open, and Steve finds Dr. Kinosian fiddling with a coffee maker on top of a filing cabinet in the back corner, standing on her tiptoes to see the buttons at the base of the machine. She has silky, short black hair, and is wearing a pair of dark jeans and a crisp striped button-down shirt. When she hears Steve knock on the doorframe, she immediately turns around and greets him with a glad, but somehow oddly professional, smile.

“Captain Rogers! Thank you so much for agreeing to meet with me,” she says, advancing towards Steve with her hand outstretched. Steve takes it, and is glad to find that Dr. Kinosian has a firm handshake.

“It’s my pleasure,” Steve says, doing his very best to be charming and not frantically scan the room for the document Dr. Kinosian supposedly found.

“Would you like some coffee? It’s almost finished,” Kinosian asks, gesturing Steve towards two chairs set up in the back of the room. It looks like she’s pushed the desk as far towards the door as possible, which Steve is grateful for. Even with the door closed, their conversation wouldn’t be too terribly private if someone walked by.

“Sure. Do you have cream and sugar?” 

“I most certainly do,” Kinosian says, pouring a generous portion of coffee into a “Wives of Henry VIII” mug, “Just tell me when to stop adding cream.”

After the door is closed and Steve and Kinosian are settled with their drinks, Kinosian gets down to business.

“So I was hoping to talk about something I found in the archives while I was researching,” she says, pulling a manila envelope out of her briefcase. “I was hoping to get to pick your brain about it. Do you mind if I record this conversations?” she asks, opening the folder carefully, and handing Steve a stack of old army memos, the top one dated from 1943. 

“Sure, you can record it,” Steve says. 

“Thank you,” Kinosian says, smiling and placing a digital recorder on the table between them. “I’m writing about LGBT servicemen and women in World War II. I’ll just give you a minute to look over it then?”

Steve nods, already lost. The top page is a memo from a Colonel Beresford… Steve remembers him now. He’d visited Steve and his commandos maybe three or four times throughout the course of the whole war. He never said much, but he did insist that some army psychologist friend of his follow them around for a couple of days.

Somehow, somehow, Colonel Beresford had found out what Steve and Bucky had been doing in New York before the war, and he requested that the two “inverts” be reassigned. 

The next page is a brusque, unequivocal “no” from Colonel Phillips, who “don’t give a damn about what Rogers and Barnes do in their spare time as long as they win us this war.” Steve appreciates that.

Then a reply from Beresford. It seems Beresford went over Phillips’ head, and while no one agreed to dishonorably discharge Steve and Bucky, it was agreed that there was “credible evidence” to suggest that the serum could cure men of their “homosexual tendencies,” and that an army psychologist be allowed to observe “Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes in their daily interactions, as well as on leave,” to see if they were continuing their “homosexual affair.”

Another protest memo from Colonel Phillips, which ends in a request for this to be kept under wraps, even from the rest of the SSR. 

The rest of the documents are psychological evaluations, blood tests, medical opinions… All attempting to answer the question whether or not the super soldier serum could cure homosexuality.

Steve is stunned, but when he looks up, he suddenly remembers where he is and whom he’s supposed to be talking to. For the first time in his life, though, he’s at a loss for words.

It must show on his face, because Kinosian looks a little concerned.

“I don’t want to be presumptuous, Captain Rogers,” she starts tentatively, “that file is yours to keep, but I just want to ask you one question before you leave… Did you know about this project of Colonel Beresford’s?”

Steve looks at her, and he can feel his hands clutching the file. 

“No, I didn’t.”

***  
Walter takes him to an exclusive place in the upper 40s. It has a doorman and is filled near to bursting with men. Men in suits, men in dresses, army officers sipping their drinks furtively in corners while admiring the legs of the drag queens performing on stage.

Walter links his arm through Steve’s, and leads him toward the bar. He orders them vodka tonics, heavy on the vodka, and grins in delight at Steve’s grimace as he downs the drink. As other men gather around them, Walter orders another round.

“And who is this, Walter?” asks one man, dressed in a neatly pressed suit and expensive imported shoes. “He’s so thin, but—“ he stops short, eyeing the noticeable bulge in Steve’s pants. Today was probably not the day to wear the underwear with the huge hole.

“He’s for sale to anyone who can help his friends out a tough spot. Steve’s the little do-gooder at my art college.”

“I think I may just have to enroll in that college of yours,” says another man, a little older than Steve and Walter. “I could fatten him up.”

“And I could warm him up,” says the first man. “I’ll share him with you, Jeffery, if you want.”

Steve leaves the place with an invitation to come back again, and a very drunk Walter leaning on his arm.

“Jus let me kiss you, Stevie,” he slurs, clamping Steve’s arm down as he tries to hail a cab. “Jus one little kiss.”

“You’re drunk. You need to go home.”

“An’ how’re you gonna get home? If you give me a kiss, I’ll have the cab drive you to wherever you live.”

Steve considers this. He’s not as drunk as Walter, but he’s seeing double and can’t be expected to find the right subway station. 

He glances around. There are two old women sitting on a stoop down the street from them, but otherwise the area’s almost deserted.

“All right. One kiss.”

The cab drops him off a block from his apartment, and as he leaves, Walter slips him a crisp ten- dollar bill.  
***  
Wednesday night. Clint is still away. Nat shows up right on time with several bottles of vodka, and finds Steve splayed out on his couch, staring up at the photocopied documents.

“If I wanted to confirm a program existed in the old SSR, how would I get access to the SHIELD archives?” Steve says without looking at Natasha.

Natasha pauses, pursing her lips briefly. 

“Easy. You give those files to me, and let me do what I do best,” she says. 

***  
“Electric bill’s due tomorrow,” Bucky says as Steve walks in the front door of the apartment, trying valiantly to support two paper bags full of groceries.

“Steve, Steve, what are you doing? Let me get those,” Bucky says, at his side immediately, taking both bags easily and giving Steve a quick kiss before setting them on the kitchen counter. When he takes the pack of bacon off the top of the first bag, his eyes go wide. 

“Thanks, Buck,” Steve says, breathless and shaking out his arms. “You said the electric bill’s due?”

“Yeah. I think I have enough, but I- What are you doing?”

Bucky has stopped unloading, and is staring at Steve, who is simply taking his wallet out of his back pocket and fingering several dollars from the billfold. 

“Getting money to pay the electric bill,” Steve responds. 

“You just bought two week’s worth of groceries at once. There’s no way you have enough to pay the electric bill, too.”

“I’m doing those WPA murals, remember? Figured I might as well bring home something besides oatmeal and rotten apples for once.”

Bucky stares at him, his face flashing from confusion to anger to hurt in an instant. It’s not a look Steve likes. 

“Is that where you go at night, too?” Bucky begins, squaring his shoulders and raising his eyebrows. “I wasn’t aware the WPA sent their artists home in cabs.”

Steve is about to retort. He’s about to say something really terrible about how Bucky won’t let him carry his own weight, or about how Bucky can never seem to hold down a job. Both accusations are unfair, Steve knows it, and he doesn’t want to make the angry-hurt face Bucky’s wearing any worse. 

So he ends up saying nothing. 

“Huh. And here I thought that you knew Brooklyn boys could fuck you better than some Manhattan pussy,” Bucky spits before Steve can say anything. He goes to push past Steve and get the hell out of the apartment, but Steve beats him to the door, planting himself in front of it with his fighting face on.

“You have to let me explain.”

“What’s there to explain? Obviously you found some guy at your art school who can treat you better than I can. Who can fuck better than I can? Who can take better care of you than I can? Hell, I can’t even hold down a damn job and take you out for a movie, let alone buy you drinks.”

“It’s not your job to take care of me. And if you’d just let me explain—“

“Somebody’s gotta do it, Steve, since you never know when to walk away from a damn fight.”

“I’m doing this for us!”

“Fucking other guys? Oh yeah, that’s absolutely something you’re ‘doing for us’.”

“It’s not like it’s my first choice! Do you want to go through the rest of the winter without heat? Or have the super banging on our door demanding the rent again?”

“So you’re prostituting yourself out now? Real, classy, Rogers.”

“Would you just shut up and listen?” Steve cries, reaching up and grabbing Bucky’s suspenders and pulling him down with a force that surprises both of them. He pulls until Bucky’s face is level with his, until there’s less than an inch between them, till they can smell the alcohol on each other’s breath and the feel heat from their flushed faces. 

“I love you,” Steve breathes, “I love you and if you would just listen-“

And then he kisses Bucky, because there’s really nothing else to do. 

***  
Two days after Steve handed the files over to Nat, he opens his door, and finds her sitting at his kitchen table, drinking coffee and reading something in an old brown folder. 

“I’m guessing you found something,” Steve says, setting down his reusable grocery bags on the counter.

“Sit down, Rogers, you’re too delicate for what I have to tell you,” is Natasha’s only reply.

Steve looks at her incredulously, but sits down across from her, folding his hands in front of him.

“There was a program to test if the super-soldier serum could cure homosexuality,” Natasha admits, pushing the file towards Steve. “Although in your case I guess it’s bisexuality, but there were quite a number of people who thought that your amour with Agent Carter was proof of a ‘cure’.”

“Part of the reason so much money was invested in trying to crack Doctor Erskine’s formula was because of this possibility. Dr. Banner actually refused to work on it until he had it in writing that the government would not use any of his results for a so-called cure.”

Steve leafs through the file as Natasha talks. There were years of secret testing, formulas that looked promising, but ended in a bust. Worst of all, Steve notices, they actually tested the possible serums on gay men. Steve can barely stand to look at the disastrous, and sometimes horrific, results. He knows now, of course, that the Super Soldier program was no stranger to human testing, especially on those who the government deemed “lesser.” He couldn’t sleep for days after learning that dozens of African-American recruits were used as guinea pigs for the serum before it was deemed safe enough to use on him… He’s seen what it did to them, and never in his whole life has he been more ashamed.

“The initiative after the war into this research was started by a Colonel Walter Beresford III. He was the one who reported your and Sergeant Barnes.”

Steve snaps his head up, all eyes on Natasha.

“I knew a Walter Beresford IV,” he says quietly.

“The Colonel’s son,” Natasha replies. “Who was rejected by the recruiting office for homosexual behavior.”

***  
1941

James Buchanan Barnes saunters home on a pleasantly cool midsummer night, ambling back to his apartment, where no doubt Steve is just walking in the door. They both have regular jobs now—Steve’s doing illustrations for a small-time newspaper that prints serial stories, and Bucky’s down at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, repairing boats to ‘lend’ to the British. God knows they need all the help they can get.

He thinks about heading over to Times’ Square. It’s getting dark, and on a night like this, he can easily make a few bucks off of some desperate lonely guy, but he thinks better of it. His and Steve’s… arrangement since that night Steve admitted to sleeping with his up-scale art friends is strictly on a “we-have-no-other-option” basis, and since neither of them are desperately unemployed at the moment… there’s really no reason to spend the night with some stranger when you can go home to each other, is there?

Bucky rounds the corner, and sees three welders he knows closing in around a young sailor, who barely looks 1A, in the mouth of an alley, just out of reach from the streetlight. Bucky sighs, curses his well developed rescue instincts, and picks up his pace so he reaches the gang just as they back the sailor into the alley.

And then he hears what they’re saying.

“You tryna’ make a pass at me, you fucking queer?” says the guy in the middle, a big, burly guy by the name of Dandridge.  
“No, no it’s just a mistake, I-“

“Oh, you made a mistake, you fucking pansy, you fucking faggot you—“

His next insult is obscured by the huge punch he levels at the sailor, hitting him right on the jaw and sending him stumbling backwards into a pile of trashcans. Bucky can hear the audible crack of shattering bone. 

“Get up, you fairy. Did Uncle Sam know what he was getting into with you?”

“Hey!” Bucky calls, pulling his cap down to hide his face. He’s covered all over with grease and oil, but a little more protection won’t hurt. 

The three welders turn, taking their attention away from kicking the poor sailor, who can barely lift his head to see who called out. 

“Get out of here now, or I’m calling the cops,” Bucky says, dropping his lunch tin on the ground, and rolling his sleeves up to show he means business. One of the guys looks scared, but the other two don’t seem convinced.

“Cops’ll thank me for getting rid of this cocksucker for them. If you ask me, I’m doing them a favor.”

Bucky decks him without thinking twice, just hard enough to send him spinning into the arms of one of his friends.

“Get out of here,” he says, and the three men scurry away. 

He finally makes it home two hours later, after calling an ambulance and telling the cops that he’d just found the sailor lying there. Steve is waiting for him, and anxiously offers him a turkey sandwich that’s been sitting out a little too long.

Bucky can’t look at Steve, can’t talk to him. All he sees is the scrawny sailor in his bloodstained uniform.

They sleep in their own beds that night, and a couple of days later Bucky brings a girl home, leaving Steve to bunk with some friends of theirs a couple floors above them. After a week of no sex, and barely any eye contact, Steve tries to ask Bucky about the sailor. 

Bucky leaves the apartment, and Steve never brings it up again.

***  
“Doctor Kinosian?” Steve asks into the mic of his cell phone.

“Speaking,” replies the crisp alto.

“This is Steve Rogers,” he hedges, unsure about how to begin.

“Captain Rogers! I didn’t expect you to call!” Kinosian exclaims, delight and surprise audible in her voice. 

“I didn’t know what I was going to end up doing myself,” Steve laughs nervously, “but I wanted to let you know that I’m willing to be interviewed for your book.”

“That’s… that’s fantastic,” she replies. 

A week later, and Steve and Kinosian are ensconced in a sound proofed room at a university in Northwest DC where Kinosian has connections. 

“Can I ask why you’ve agreed to do this interview?” Kinosian begins tentatively, turning on her tape recorder after Steve hands her the release form he, Nat, and Clint went over line by line the night before.

“I guess I just thought the story needed to be told.”

“And you didn’t know about the theories and memos in the 1940s, correct?”

“Not at all.”

Kinosian smiles, and the interview continues apace. Steve answers questions about his life in New York before the war, about the bars he went to with Walter Beresford, about how he basically prostituted himself out to rich men to make ends meet, and how Bucky occasionally worked Times Square after he found out. He talks about how he coached himself to give the correct answers on his psychological evaluations, about how he tried to enlist five different times. About how his time with the SSR and the Howling Commandos was the best time of his life.

He reminisces about coming home to Bucky for a few brief years, and about the beat-up sailor that scared Bucky so much he kept at least two feet away from Steve for months afterward, but Bucky leaves the most personal stories out. There are some things he doesn’t want to share with anyone, like how scared Bucky was or the looks they gave each other when they knew no one was looking. 

At the end of the day, Kinosian hits the stop button on her recorder, and turns the Steve, a smile on her face and pride in her eyes.

“I don’t think you know how much your interview and your… coming out, I guess, is going to do a lot of things for a lot of people everywhere.”

Steve shrugs, and stands to leave, shaking Kinosian’s hand. She promises him an advanced copy of the book, which will be published in another year and a half. 

“Thank you, Doctor Kinosian, it’s been—“

“No, I get to thank you here, Captain Rogers. This interview is going to make my book worth reading to so many more of my colleagues than normal. You’ve really helped me out.”

“Glad to help,” Steve says, pushing the door open and giving Kinosian one last brief wave.

***  
Epilogue Steve is getting really tired of worn-out brown folders, but the one on the Winter Soldier Natasha handed him over Nick Fury’s “grave” in Arlington is probably the most important folder he’s ever possessed, and not only because of the amount of favors Nat had to call in to get it.

The last document in the file is dated from the early 1960s, and is a memo not unlike the ones Steve’s read about his and Bucky’s relationship by Colonel Beresford.

Except instead of curing a wanting to cure Bucky of any “homosexual tendencies,” the author of the memo is more concerned with the “illicit affair” between the Black Widow and the Winter Soldier. 

It recommends that the Soldier’s memories be wiped in between each mission, and that he be put into a cryogenic sleep. The affair is starting to trigger old memories…The Soldier is speaking in English when angered.

Under the memo is a piece of paper covered in Natasha’s neat, controlled hand:

“Looks like it never really started with me, either.”  
\--Nat


End file.
